Steam Changing How it Handles Soundtracks

[Guest_Jim_*]

For many games, music plays an important part of their experience by setting a certain mood or even telling part of the story, which is part of the reason gamers will sometimes also purchase a game soundtrack. Handling these soundtracks on Steam can be a bit of a pain though, as they will exist as DLC for the game, which means you must own the game on Steam and must download the game to get the soundtrack. Fortunately this is going to change as Valve is rolling out the first set of changes for managing soundtracks to developers.

One of these changes is to make a new soundtrack category for Steam, which will allow them to be separate from the game. This means you would be able to purchase the soundtrack without owning the game on Steam and you could download the soundtrack without the game. Customers will also be able to set a specific directory for the soundtracks to be downloaded to, instead of requiring you search through the game installation folder to find the files. It will also be possible for developers to provide multiple quality levels, like FLAC or raw WAV files instead of lossy MP3, that customers can choose to download or not. The soundtracks will be able to include other content too, such as album art and liner notes. Developers can even place soundtracks on Steam for games not yet on the platform as well.

To help developers take advantage of these new features, Valve has created a tool to automate the conversion of soundtrack DLC to the new soundtrack type. This tool will reuse existing information, so those who own soundtrack DLC will get the new version as well. The system is not complete yet, because Valve wants to get it out there so feedback from developers and customers.

Source: Valve

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